This Video of People Fleeing Times Square Shows We Live Under the Tyranny of the Gun

In this America we have made for ourselves, you can survive the deadliest mass shooting in the nation's history only to find yourself in the path of another mass murderer's bullets in a matter of months. We learned that after the massacre in Thousand Oaks, California last November, where 13 people were shot dead and at least 10 were injured during a local bar's country music night. Some of the people there had survived the massacre on the Las Vegas strip just over a year before, where 58 people were killed and 442 more were wounded. And it happened again a little over a week ago, at the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Three people who survived the horrors of Route 91 in Vegas found themselves scrambling, again, to escape another American mass murderer as he shot four people to death and injured 13.

Perhaps we should have known that Vegas, with the sheer scale of its terrors, would spawn these uniquely American coincidences. Among developed nations, only in this country does the thought of being shot to death because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time loom over all that we do. If you're an American, you can be shot at the mall. You can be shot at school. You can be shot at a concert. You can be shot at the park. There have been 253 mass shootings this year, after all, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which classifies an incident where four or more people are shot as a "mass" event. To be an American is to know that when you venture outside, you have a better chance than the citizen of any other country in the developed world of being shot by a complete and total stranger who has easy access to incredibly powerful weaponry.

This is not insanity. It is the rational response. The fear of an attack in a public venue is the end result of this unrelenting terrorism—that we must all think about these guns and what they're capable of, all the time.

Our kids are subjected to "active shooter" drills at school, where teachers place paper over the windows of classroom doors in the hope that would-be murderers will not see in and attempt to enter. An entire generation has been raised this way, marinating in fear as they study algebra. Children as young as 6 are saddled with the thought of deadly violence finding them at their desks, coached to cower in the closet every few months. Sometimes, these drills are outright sadistic. It is the "duck-and-cover" of our times, a safety measure that mostly succeeds in terrorizing our kids. There is now a cottage industry for bulletproof backpacks. Get yours now—it's back-to-school season, after all.

The bullets seem to be everywhere.

MEGAN JELINGERGetty Images

We think about what we would do at the office to try to save ourselves or our coworkers. Run, hide, fight, they tell us. Which stairwell would you run for? Which room would you try to barricade yourself inside? Personally, I spend a lot of time thinking about what these bullets would do to my body, how nauseatingly, inescapably painful it would be, and how even if I survived, my life would never be the same. I would never play soccer or basketball again. I might never walk. Maybe I would have problems with speech. Maybe I couldn't write.

These are not healthy thoughts to have, but they are perfectly natural. This is the psychic toll of terrorism, and why it is so effective as a tool of political and social coercion. It weighs heavily on the mind, a burden that can feel like too much alongside the things we really should have to care about: our families, our friends, our careers, our favorite teams, a cold beer on a hot day at a music festival.

We have allowed it to gain such a stranglehold on us all because of how we have chosen to organize our society. In many areas of our nation, there are far more stringent tests and procedures you must navigate to drive a car than carry a gun. Someone can maim and kill others with a vehicle. But that is a gun's only purpose, the reason for its existence. Even if you're subjected to a background check—22 percent of buyers reportedly are not—there is often no safety training, no driver's-test equivalent, before you can freely wield a deadly weapon. In many states, you can carry a weapon of war in the street. I can't recommend doing so if you're not white, however. There are often no requirements about how you store your gun, which regularly leads to children getting hold of them and killing themselves or their siblings or friends by accident.

El Paso, Texas, 2019: Dispatches from a free society.

JOEL ANGEL JUAREZGetty Images

And you can pretty much own any weapon you want. The Gilroy murderer used an AK-47 "style" rifle to shoot a six-year-old child to death. Like so many other mass murderers, the shooter who killed 26 people sitting in church in Sutherland Springs, Texas—remember that one?—used a semiautomatic rifle like the AR-15—in that case, a Ruger AR-556. Yet people really still argue that we need the country awash in these weapons of war because of feral hogs, or because they really believe they will fight off agents of a tyrannical government with them. Never mind that the government has tanks and drones, or that in these baroque fantasies, the AR-15 aficionados are mowing down American soldiers or cops.

The gun manufacturers, fronted by the NRA—an organization that has once again shown that people who lack ethics will behave unethically in everything they do—have one response to these incidents: more guns. Never mind that the United States already has more guns than people. Arm the teachers, and have them shoot it out with some psycho in front of the children they're supposed to be teaching multiplication tables. Put armed guards everywhere. Fox News' Sean Hannity, a close adviser to the president, suggested this in response to the weekend's horrors:

Presidential adviser Sean Hannity: "I'd like to see the perimeter of every school in America surrounded, secured by retired police ... have one armed guard on every floor of every school, all over every mall, the perimeter and inside every hall of every mall." pic.twitter.com/Renh47IiBY

This is just piling on the fear. This is a militarized society, where the only currency is power and it is exercised at the point of a gun. We are all forced to live in this John Wayne fantasy, where the Good Guys With Guns fight it out with the Bad Guys With Guns, and if some of us get caught in the crossfire, that's just the price of being an American. Maybe you should have had a gun. Meanwhile, the police in Dayton responded in 30 seconds, but not before the shooter killed nine people. Were the bar patrons supposed to be strapped to fight him off in that 30-second window? The Sutherland Springs incident was held up as a shining example of a Good Guy With a Gun, since another guy with AR-15s fought off the shooter. Yet 26 people died. That's a victory? This is not freedom, it is tyranny.

It has gotten to the point that other countries are issuing travel advisories to their citizens about the risks of setting foot in the United States. Some of them, like Venezuela's warning, may well be political stunts. Uruguayans have been warned to take precautions when visiting because of our "increasing indiscriminate violence" and hate crimes fueled by "racism and discrimination that cost the lives of more than 250 people in the first seven months of this year." The authorities there specifically warn against frequenting areas where large groups of people congregate: theme parks, festivals, malls. Times Square. Participating in our culture is dangerous. Previously, France, New Zealand and Germany have issued warnings about our American problem. On Sunday, the Japanese consulate in Detroit advised that we are a "gun society," and that the potential for gunfire exists everywhere.

Two women embrace after the shooting at a nightlife center in Dayton.

Matthew HatcherGetty Images

Japan, for what it's worth, represents a model for gun ownership that a sane country that cared about the mass death of its citizens might, to varying degrees, pursue. The BBC has the details:

You have to attend an all-day class, take a written exam and pass a shooting-range test with a mark of at least 95%. There are also mental health and drugs tests. Your criminal record is checked and police look for links to extremist groups. Then they check your relatives too - and even your work colleagues. And as well as having the power to deny gun licences, police also have sweeping powers to search and seize weapons.

That's not all. Handguns are banned outright. Only shotguns and air rifles are allowed. The law restricts the number of gun shops. In most of Japan's 40 or so prefectures there can be no more than three, and you can only buy fresh cartridges by returning the spent cartridges you bought on your last visit.

Police must be notified where the gun and the ammunition are stored - and they must be stored separately under lock and key. Police will also inspect guns once a year. And after three years your licence runs out, at which point you have to attend the course and pass the tests again.

Not all of these policies would work in America. And many people have a legitimate need to own a gun, whether they live in a rural area where the police will not respond in time in case of an emergency, or whether they just feel they need a means of self-defense. A handgun might be the best option for them. And politically, all this might be impossible. But as a philosophical matter, the Japanese view civilian gun ownership as a privilege, not a right. And the result is that, in 2017, three people in Japan were killed by guns. Three, in a population of 126 million. In the United States, the number was nearly 40,000.

After all, mass shootings are a statistically small share of our ritual bloodletting—the sacrifice for freedom. More than 33,000 people have been shot so far in 2019, including close to 1,831 teenagers and 397 children. 8,896 Americans have died, and many of those are suicides. Research suggests having a gun in the house makes suicide more likely to be successful. It also raises the risk of homicide and accidental death. If we changed the attitudes around our gun culture in a way that recognized the power and destructive potential of these weapons—treated them with respect, not lust—we could change the way we own them and use them.

For now, though, we are all under the tyranny of the gun. We have lots of guns and lots of people get shot and that's just the way it is. If you leave the house in America, you'd better be ready to run.

Jack HolmesPolitics EditorJack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire.com, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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